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On May 22th 2007 the Astronomy Picture of the day showed one movie made at our solar group. After so many years visiting that webpage is an honor to be able to contribute. This web page was created to explain a little more about the movie published. Plase feel free to ask your questions. I have published also a conference procceding also about this data.


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Using the latest technological advances, solar physicists are nowadays able to observe in great detail complex phenomena on the Sun; like the one shown in this movie. This sunspot (NOAA 875) appeared on the Sun one year ago, erupting many flares during it's lifetime. The Vacuum Tower Telescope at Izaña (Spain) was observing that region of the Sun using its powerful instruments. By means of sophisticated adaptive optics in real time and digital image processing techniques afterwards, the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere could be countered, reaching very high spatial resolution. The movie shows the evolution of the photosphere of the Sun over almost one hour. Using a tunable filter technique we are able to obtain images depicting different heights in the Sun's chromosphere at the same time. Along with its quiet evolution at the surface shown in this movie, we can see a completely different landscape up in the atmospshere (see movie below). After emerging trough the surface of the Sun as sunspots (dark spots in the movie above) the strong magnetic fields take control over the dynamics at the Sun's atmosphere, forcing the plasma to follow it's changes. These complex forces drive the flows and induce the eruption of flares as seen below.


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Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño, Klaus Gerhard Puschmann, Franz Kneer, Julián Blanco Rodríguez & Nazaret Bello González